Part 37

He sat bowed by the bed. A moth perished in the flame of the lamp, and the light flickered through the room--it seemed that Lettice grimaced, but it was only the other. Her face had grown sharper: it was such a travesty of her that, somehow, he ceased to associate it with Lettice at all. Instead he began to think of it as something exclusively of his own making--it was what he had done with things, with life.

The sheet lay over the motionless body like a thin covering of snow on the turnings of the earth; it defined her breasts and a hip as crisply as though they were cut in marble effigy on a tomb of youthful dissolution. He followed the impress of an arm to the hand; and, leaning forward, touched it. A coldness seemed to come through the cover to his fingers. He let his hand stay upon hers--perhaps the warmth would flow back into the cold arm, the chill heart; perhaps he could give her some of his vitality. The possibility afforded him a meager comfort, instilled a faint glow into his benumbed being. His hand closed upon that covered by the linen like a shroud. He sat rigid, concentrated, in his effort, his purpose. The light flickered again from the fiery perishing of a second moth.

A strange feeling crept over him, a deepened sense of suspense, of imminence. He fingered his throat, and his hand was icy where it touched his burning face. He stood up in an increasing, nameless disturbance.

A faint spasm crossed the drained countenance beneath him; the mouth fell open.

He knew suddenly that Lettice was dead.

There her clothes lay strewn on the chair and floor, the long, black stockings and the rumpled chemise strung with narrow blue ribband. She had worn them on her warm, young body; she had tied the ribband in the morning and untied it at night, untied it at night ... it was night now.

A slow, exhausted deliberation of mind and act took the place of his late panic. He smoothed the sheet where he had grasped her hand in the futile endeavor to instil into her some of his warmth. He gazed at her for a moment, at the shadows like pools of ink poured into the caverns of her eyes, at a glint of teeth no whiter than the rest, at the dark plait of her hair lying sinuously over the pillow. Then he went to the door:

"Mrs. Caley," he pronounced. The woman appeared in the doorway from the kitchen. "Mrs. Caley," he repeated, "Lettice is dead."

She started forward with a convulsive gasp, and he turned aside and walked heavily out onto the porch. He stood for a moment gazing absently into the darkened valley, at the few lights of Greenstream village, the stars like clusters of silver grapes on high, ultra-blue arbors. The whippoorwills throbbed from beyond the stream, the stream itself whispered in a pervasive monotone. The first George Gordon Makimmon, resting on the porch of his new house isolated in the alien wild, had heard the whippoorwills and the stream. Gordon's father had heard them just as he, the present Makimmon, heard them sounding in the night. But no other Makimmon would ever listen to the persistent birds, the eternal whisper of the water, because he, the last, had killed his wife ... he had killed their child.

He trod down the creaking steps to the soft, fragrant sod, and made his way to where a thread of light outlined the stable door. Sim was seated on a box, the lantern at his feet casting a pale flicker over his riven face and the horse muzzling the trough. Gordon sat down upon the broken chair.

"She's dead," he said, after a minute. Simeon Caley made no immediate reply, and he repeated in exactly the same manner:

"She's dead."

A sudden bitterness of contempt flamed in the other's ineffable blue eyes. "God damn you to hell!" he exclaimed; "now you got the money and nothing to hinder you."

His resentment vanished as quickly as it had appeared. He rose and picked up the lantern, and with their puny illumination they went out together into the dark.

THREE

On an afternoon of the second autumn following Lettice's death Gordon was fetching home a headstall resewn by Peterman. The latter, in a small shed filled with the penetrating odor of dressed leather at the back of the hotel, exercised the additional trade of saddler. General Jackson ambled at Gordon's heel.

The dog had grown until his shoulder reached the man's knee; he was compact and powerful, with a long, heavy jaw and pronounced, grave whiskers; the wheaten color of his legs and head had lightened, sharply defining the coarse black hair upon his back.

October was drawing to a close: the autumn had been dry, and the foliage was not brilliantly colored, but exhibited a single shade of dusty brown that, in the sun, took the somber gleams of clouded gold. It was warm still, but a furtive wind, stirring the dead leaves uneasily over the ground, was momentarily ominous, chill.

The limp rim of a felt hat obscured Gordon's features, out of the shadow of which protruded his lean, sharp chin. His heavy shoes, hastily scraped of mud, bore long cuts across the heels, while shapeless trousers, a coat with gaping pockets, hung loosely about his thin body and bowed shoulders. He passed the idlers before the office of the Bugle with a scarcely perceptible nod; but, farther on, he stopped before a solitary figure advancing over the narrow footway.

It was Buckley Simmons. He was noticeably smaller since his injury at the camp meeting; he had shrivelled; his face was peaked and wrinkled like the face of a very old man; the shadows in the sunken cheeks did not resemble those on living skin, but were dry and dusty like the autumn leaves. His gaze was fixed upon the ground at his feet; but, as he drew up to Gordon, he raised his head.

Into the dullness of his eyes, his slack lips, crept a dim recognition; among the ashes of his consciousness a spark glowed--a single, live coal of bitter hate.

"How are you, Buckley?" Gordon pronounced slowly.

The other's hands clenched as the wave of emotion crossed the blank countenance. Then the hands relaxed, the face was again empty. He continued, oblivious of Gordon's salutation, of his presence, upon his way.

Gordon Makimmon stood for a moment gazing after him. Then, as he turned, he saw that there was a small group of men on the Courthouse lawn; he saw the sheriff standing facing them from the steps, gesticulating.

The purpose of this gathering was instantly apparent to him, it stirred obscure memories into being.--A property was being publicly sold for debt.

The trooping thoughts of the past filled his mind; thoughts, it seemed to him, of another than himself. Surely it had been another Gordon Makimmon that, sitting before the Bugle office, had heard the sheriff enumerating the scant properties of the old freehold by the stream to satisfy the insatiable greed of Valentine Simmons. It had been a younger man than himself by fifteen years. Yet, actually, it had been scarcely more than three years since the storekeeper had had him sold out.

That other Makimmon had been a man of incredibly vivid interests and emotions. Now it appeared to him that, in all the world, there was not a cause for feeling, not an incentive to rouse the mind from apathy.

Stray periods reached him from the sheriff's recounting of "a highly desirable piece of property." His loud, flat voice had not changed by an inflection since he had "called out" Gordon's home; the merely curious or materially interested onlookers were the same, the dragging bidding had, apparently, continued unbroken from the other occasion. The dun, identical repetition added to the overwhelming sense of universal monotony in Gordon Makimmon's brain. He turned at the corner, by Simmons' store, while the memories faded; the customary greyness, like a formless drift of cloud obscuring a mountain height, once more descended upon him.